Forget about EMR interoperability between doctors’ offices and hospitals for a moment.

One of the recent developments in the ever-expanding SaaS (software as a service) world of electronic medical records must be the challenge of making all the individual software components talk together correctly.

There is (1) the EMR itself, (2) the programming platform/language, and the (3) internet browser. Forgive the novice in me if I don’t get all my nomenclature correct. I’m just a doctor. If one component gets upgraded (and they always do), then the house of cards can come tumbling down in one fell swoop, at least temporarily. We’ve experienced this recently at our office with our own EMR system and so I have a few thoughts on the matter.

In our office, first it was Firefox stopped working with the EMR. Then we all switched over to Internet Explorer, which seemed to work for a time, but then that stopped working well and frequently froze up. Chrome is working for now, but it seems to be only a ticking timebomb before this no longer works.

To make matters more complicated, different browsers have different ways of displaying information bars at the top, sides and bottom of the EMR window, and so some bars can get in the way of viewing different parts of the screen depending on which browser is used. There are ways around this (conveniently called “workarounds”), but yet again, not so simple or straightforward and thus suboptimal. I have to admit that it sort of feels like jiggling the handle on an old toilet to get it to stop running. In other words, yes, you can do it, but, no, it doesn’t feel like it should work that way ideally.

We’ve been given the explanation that Adobe Flash is having problems interacting with the EMR system, or vice versa, since both the EMR and Flash have gone through successive, iterative upgrades to improve and add functionality to both services. I can totally buy this explanation. However, at what point will it just get too difficult to keep everything going? Is it impossible? Probably not. But it’s a heck of a pain watching the EMR go through roadblocks as we forge into the future together, as vendor and provider.

This will undoubtedly affect any EMR system that is dependent upon other, third-party software. It is a common situation that will change over time, and I’m almost certain that this is going to be a challenge, all around, for any EMR system on the market today. As such is the case, I look forward to the day when it can be solved permanently by adopting a new standard for all platforms.

Dr. West is an endocrinologist in private practice in Washington, DC. He completed fellowship training in Endocrinology and Metabolism at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Dr. West opened The Washington Endocrine Clinic, PLLC in 2009. He can be contacted at doctorwestindc@gmail.com.